1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a software tool to assist investigators with analysis of data relating to various activities and phenonomenologies, in particular, in associating observable data with related chemical substances, equipment, and processes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Man-made substances are generally produced by performing a series of processing steps in which substances are contacted in a particular manner and sequence, to generate a desired final product. There are needs to link resources to activities for purposes of evaluating capabilities or forensically deducing activities from piecemeal information. Given a finite set of resources, an example of an evaluation of capabilities is in the development of a meal plan. An inventory of foodstuffs can be used in a range of recipes to generate a number of dishes. A means of assessing the potential alternatives could be used by a restaurant for optimizing inventory exploitation. This approach could be used in the chemical process industry as well. An example of using certain information forensically to infer potential activities involves nonproliferation analysis for weapons of mass destruction. In a typical scenario, an investigator may be interested in understanding the capabilities of a suspected facility to produce banned chemical weapons agents instead of advertised products. This investigator may infer various scenarios given different legitimate and illegitimate activities that may be occurring at the suspect site. To ascertain the capabilities of the facility, the investigator would have to use a highly trained chemical engineer and or a library of technical support information to determine the chemicals, equipment, and processing steps required to produce various illicit chemical agents or alternative, advertised products. If the analyst has certain information about the facility, it may also be possible to deduce the nature of the activities. The available information would have to be integrated with the detailed chemical engineering domain knowledge much the same as the above inferencing process.
For the inference, the information or “observables” may be in the form of chemical by-products present in the soil, water, or air, observable features of a processing facility (e.g., a smoke stack of a certain size), discovery of specific equipment, etc. Such scenarios are increasingly common, for example, in the field of non-proliferation and data gathering, where it is important to monitor the activity of chemical facilities and suspicious sites for illegal, dangerous chemicals. However, very often it is impossible to directly monitor the facilities to obtain sufficient information.
It is recognized that there is no replacement for a knowledgeable expert or a technical library, but it is possible to harness essential information to support the activities of this expert. Conventional resources such as textbooks, other literature, and existing databases are often distributed and decentralized, and they do not facilitate investigation of alternatives given a variety of constraints. It is desired to have a single source as a convenient, comprehensive tool for the investigation of observable clues to discover what activities or capabilities might be associated with them. There is no product known that facilitates this kind of activity.